W3C announces plan to deliver HTML 5 by 2014, HTML 5.1 in 2016

Breaking the spec up into smaller pieces will allow swifter standardization.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the group that manages development of the main specifications used by the Web, has proposed a new plan that would see the HTML 5 spec positioned as a Recommendation—which in W3C's lingo represents a complete, finished standard—by the end of 2014. The group plans a follow-up, HTML 5.1, for the end of 2016.

Under the new plan, the HTML Working Group will produce an HTML 5.0 Candidate Recommendation by the end of 2012 that includes only those features that are specified, stable, and implemented in real browsers. Anything controversial or unstable will be excluded from this specification. The group will also remove anything known to have interoperability problems between existing implementations. This Candidate Recommendation will form the basis of the 5.0 specification.

In tandem, a draft of HTML 5.1 will be developed. This will include everything from the HTML 5.0 Candidate Recommendation, plus all the unstable features that were excluded. In 2014, this will undergo a similar process. Anything unstable will be taken out, to produce the HTML 5.1 Candidate Recommendation, and an HTML 5.2 draft will emerge, with the unstable parts left in.

This will then continue, for HTML 5.3, 5.4, and beyond.

Previously, HTML 5 wasn't due to be completed until 2022 (yes—a decade from now). The Candidate Recommendation was due to be delivered around now, with much of the next ten years spent developing an extensive test suite to allow conformance testing of implementations. The new HTML 5.1 will be smaller as a number of technologies (such as Web Workers and WebSockets) were once under the HTML 5 umbrella but have now been broken out into separate specifications. It will also have less stringent testing requirements. Portions of the specification where interoperability has been demonstrated "in the wild" will not need new tests, and instead testing will focus on new features.

HTML 5's standardization has been a fractious process, with many arguments and squabbles as different groups with different priorities struggled to find common ground. The new plan notes that the "negative tone of discussion has been an ongoing problem" and says that the Working Group will need to be better to combat anti-social behavior. The proposed plan was, however, not universally welcomed. Some Working Group members were unhappy with the proposed treatment of their particular areas of expertise.

For Web developers, the impact of the new plan may be limited; developers are already used to working from draft specifications on a day-to-day basis. The most immediate consequence is those pieces deemed stable enough for inclusion in version 5.0 should acquire a richer test suite. In turn, that will help browser developers track down (and, with luck, remedy) any remaining bugs and incompatibilities.

This is just sad. Technology moves way faster than the W3C. Perhaps if this group could get its act together it would be easier for coders to make sites that work across browsers without hacks and non-standard CSS prefixes.

This is just sad. Technology moves way faster than the W3C. Perhaps if this group could get its act together it would be easier for coders to make sites that work across browsers without hacks and non-standard CSS prefixes.

The W3C should either have doctoral students do some pro-bono work on the review and approval process so that it is streamlined and optimized (All that red tape is ridiculous) before we get HTML 6 in 2050.

The way this is going, we might as well just make webpages on HTML 4 for the rest of eternity, for the sake of compatibility.

This is just sad. Technology moves way faster than the W3C. Perhaps if this group could get its act together it would be easier for coders to make sites that work across browsers without hacks and non-standard CSS prefixes.

Comments like this make me sad. I really wonder if people don't realize how much easier it is to implement things than it is to actually write up good spec documents and tests for them. Especially when half the players in the game (despite their public love for HTML) are actively trying to patent/keep things secret for as long as they possibly can.

This is just sad. Technology moves way faster than the W3C. Perhaps if this group could get its act together it would be easier for coders to make sites that work across browsers without hacks and non-standard CSS prefixes.

Comments like this make me sad. I really wonder if people don't realize how much easier it is to implement things than it is to actually write up good spec documents and tests for them. Especially when half the players in the game (despite their public love for HTML) are actively trying to patent/keep things secret for as long as they possibly can.

I think the latter is more important here than the former. Apple, Microsoft, and maybe even Google, probably prefer HTML to be at least one step behind their own platforms. Just advanced enough to offer a service about everywhere, but not so advanced as to threaten the native platform.

Note to the author: The last sentence is off target, because by and large, the browser developers don't pay much attention to what the W3C HTML spec says. The browser vendors generally do work in the WHATWG, whose plans to maintain a living standard have not changed. The W3C's decisions to call something "HTML5" versus "HTML5.1" or whatever are pretty irrelevant.

Note to the author: The last sentence is off target, because by and large, the browser developers don't pay much attention to what the W3C HTML spec says. The browser vendors generally do work in the WHATWG, whose plans to maintain a living standard have not changed. The W3C's decisions to call something "HTML5" versus "HTML5.1" or whatever are pretty irrelevant.

--Peter Kasting, Chromium developer

Firefox and IE, at least, still accept bugs against W3C's specs, and, at least in the case of Microsoft, still fix 'em (Mozilla, on the other hand, is happy to not bother complying with CSS features that haven't changed since CSS 1). Maybe Google doesn't pay much attention to W3C. I don't think it's fair to say that other vendors don't.

HTML is a mess, i work with it all the time and it's just a joke. Atleast with Flash you have just one powerful and consistent programming language that does everything, instead of some mix of messy and under-performing languages that are somehow meant to all work together and may or may not work properly/well depending on the browser.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the group that manages development of the main specifications used by the Web, has proposed a new plan that would see the HTML 5 spec positioned as a Recommendation

None of this matters. We're building sites NOW, with or without specs, and the vendors should just keep on truckin' at the same fast pace that they have been, the W3C be damned.

The floodgates have already been opened. Once they're open and the water has started flowing, it's impossible tell developers, "No, you'll have to wait", just as it's impossible to tell a man not to gorge himself on water after having spent days in the desert without anything to drink.

There are already thousands of sites out there taking advantage of many of the yet-to-be-finalized features of "HTML5". It's no problem, really. Just test for features during page load using whatever you like (e.g.: Modernizr), and fall back if something isn't detected. Gone are the days when you code to a particular HTML version. Not many people use the phrase "progressive enhancement" anymore; the practice is so ingrained in developers' minds that it has now become instinct.

Firefox and IE, at least, still accept bugs against W3C's specs, and, at least in the case of Microsoft, still fix 'em (Mozilla, on the other hand, is happy to not bother complying with CSS features that haven't changed since CSS 1). Maybe Google doesn't pay much attention to W3C. I don't think it's fair to say that other vendors don't.

Mozilla, Google, and Apple all do their work in the WHATWG. Microsoft is the only vendor that thinks the W3C is interesting.

This is just sad. Technology moves way faster than the W3C. Perhaps if this group could get its act together it would be easier for coders to make sites that work across browsers without hacks and non-standard CSS prefixes.

Comments like this make me sad. I really wonder if people don't realize how much easier it is to implement things than it is to actually write up good spec documents and tests for them. Especially when half the players in the game (despite their public love for HTML) are actively trying to patent/keep things secret for as long as they possibly can.

I think the latter is more important here than the former. Apple, Microsoft, and maybe even Google, probably prefer HTML to be at least one step behind their own platforms. Just advanced enough to offer a service about everywhere, but not so advanced as to threaten the native platform.

I am not so sure about that. Google and Microsoft have both made HTML5 a first class programming language in their respective operating systems and Apple - at least at the beginning - tried to convince developers to use HTML5 apps for the iPhone. A lot of those companies also contribute patent free stuff to the standard like canvas.

HTML is a mess, i work with it all the time and it's just a joke. Atleast with Flash you have just one powerful and consistent programming language that does everything, instead of some mix of messy and under-performing languages that are somehow meant to all work together and may or may not work properly/well depending on the browser.

From what I remember after having made a handful of web applications, it indeed wasn't pretty and I ended up with a strong dislike for javascript. But that was 5 years ago.

However, every single site massively using Flash that I had the displeasure to visit has proven to be an unusable mess, not very optimised and with almost zero indexing possibilities, leading to utterly stupid things such as not being able to bookmark a particular "page" somewhere in the site, not necessarily being able to use the mouse wheel and now, absolutely not able to be used on most smartphones. In other words, a website entirely made of flash is all well and good to serve as a showcase for artists that you'll visit once every ten years.

That said, I'd like to know more about the difference between W3C and this WHAT-WG. I thought the WHAT-WG was a group from the W3C who had to pioneer web technologies, so why is it that is seems to suddenly have become independent and moving at its own pace?

I think the latter is more important here than the former. Apple, Microsoft, and maybe even Google, probably prefer HTML to be at least one step behind their own platforms. Just advanced enough to offer a service about everywhere, but not so advanced as to threaten the native platform.

I am not so sure about that. Google and Microsoft have both made HTML5 a first class programming language in their respective operating systems and Apple - at least at the beginning - tried to convince developers to use HTML5 apps for the iPhone. A lot of those companies also contribute patent free stuff to the standard like canvas.

They do indeed contribute to HTML5, but not as much as they could.

HTML apps in WinRT have their own extended non-standard api. So Microsoft makes sure HTML5 in WinRT is more powerful than HTML5 in the browser.

Apple first was more scared of hurting their precious platform by allowing custom apps, but later turned around. The script framework they promoted was mostly to show flash was redundant. Of course they left out some powerful flash features. Meanwhile, native iOS apps are much more powerful.

Does it even make sense to have an monolithic HTML standard any more? Break it up into its constituent parts and let them progress at their own rates. And, if necessary, create an HTML Core standard that must be leveraged by new versions of the constituent parts.

There is no doubt that Microsoft did a good job when writing a stack of conformance tests when developing IE9/10. Perhaps every browser developer should be required to provide resources to do this to assist the standards group in helping ensure that all browsers all operate in the same way.

Any web developer will tell you how much of a pain it is that websites have to be tested in every different make and version of browser.

We need to hold browser developers up to a higher standard than today, but the only way to do that is if the standards are less ambiguous, and the best way to do that it by providing validation test cases.

It's catch 22 for the standards authority.. release too soon and the standard is weak, wait too long and because the market wants the new features and wants to push forward, the market has fragmented quality where developers thought they were conforming. One possible solution is to have those promoting changes/extensions to the standard to provide a comprehensive test suite when the proposal is made, so if people want to implement it early, they can, and all be on the same page.

This is just sad. Technology moves way faster than the W3C. Perhaps if this group could get its act together it would be easier for coders to make sites that work across browsers without hacks and non-standard CSS prefixes.

Since when have standards set by W3C resulted in browsers being standards-compliant?

Firefox and IE, at least, still accept bugs against W3C's specs, and, at least in the case of Microsoft, still fix 'em (Mozilla, on the other hand, is happy to not bother complying with CSS features that haven't changed since CSS 1). Maybe Google doesn't pay much attention to W3C. I don't think it's fair to say that other vendors don't.

Mozilla, Google, and Apple all do their work in the WHATWG. Microsoft is the only vendor that thinks the W3C is interesting.

And also the vendor whose browser has the largest market share, so your claim that W3C is somehow an irrelevance seems a little dubious.

We got to the moon faster than the W3C can get a new standard for formatting HTML content out. Not impressed.

I don't care HOW difficult it is to coordinate, there's no way it should take decades to get a damn HTML spec set. Entire platforms with complete programming languages have been launched faster than that.

How do they figure than can even BEGIN to meet the needs of the internet in 10 years when they are already so far behind? Video has become commonplace, a cornerstone of the internet. The <video> tag should have been something that "just worked" 5 years ago.Now they're saying we'll see it in a finished spec in 2 years? That's almost a decade after Youtube launched.

I don't pretend to know the solution, but the fact is if W3C takes this long to work out standards, then they'll increasingly be rendered moot. They simply can't react fast enough to changes in technology and usagepatterns. 10 years ago, no one would have guessed video would be so integral to the internet - what new technologies and uses will we have found in 2016, that W3C will develop standards for 10 years from then...?

Depressing.

(And yeah, I realize a lot of these things get implemented much faster, like a lot of the important HTML5 tags and technologies, but that just further raises the question "Do we really need the W3C if they can't keep pace?")

Numeric releases are so 2000. Can't they name HTML 5 something catchy ... like Bladderwrack Bat or Ice Toad Sandwich, or Jelly Belly Bean Beaver? How can you say we've made progress when you can't even keep up with the current meme in product distribution naming?

It's catch 22 for the standards authority.. release too soon and the standard is weak, wait too long and because the market wants the new features and wants to push forward, the market has fragmented quality where developers thought they were conforming. One possible solution is to have those promoting changes/extensions to the standard to provide a comprehensive test suite when the proposal is made, so if people want to implement it early, they can, and all be on the same page.

Weaker standards would be less of a problem if we didn't have to live with them for 12-15 years between each major version.

It seems to me the bigger catch-22 is given the long development of the standard, W3C feels they need to make it more solid, which increases development time, which means they need to make it still more robust and so forth.

Of course at some point, we get to where the market is fragmented just because users don't upgrade fast enough, but these days, people update their browsers (and thus become current) much faster, in large part due to the auto-update functions.Companies with in-house apps and large numbers of users of course have a slower update schedule, but if you can't move to a new browser version every 5 years or so, you're probably going to have hundreds of security holes and vulnerabilities anyway.

L.

(Caveat: I'm not a web-developer, but designer and occasionally light front-end'er when required).

This is just sad. Technology moves way faster than the W3C. Perhaps if this group could get its act together it would be easier for coders to make sites that work across browsers without hacks and non-standard CSS prefixes.

It seems, then, that they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Before, when they tried to compensate for the speed of technology by stating that the HTML spec was to be evolving - they got slammed because they presented a constantly moving target. Now they'll get slammed because by pinning down versions, they're bound to move too slowly for technology.

Personally, I think this a good compromise. The previous moving target was a mistake - as seen by the amount of work it takes to write cross-platform HTML5 today. The old recommendation said that each vendor should use its own extensions and naming prefix to implement upcoming features -- the end result is that you need to code for each different engine. Practically speaking this is remarkably similar to the previous browser-specific feature hell that we endured through the 90s and early 00s. The only mitigating factor is the existence of third-party framework which try to abstract some of this way - but that didn't fix the fundamentally broken nature of it.

With this change, we'll be able to get a fixed, standardized feature set across browsers for a given level of claimed compatibility. This is a huge step forward, assuming the browser makers are on board. It might not be as fast as we want to see new features, but it's a whole lot better than what we have now.

HTML is a mess, i work with it all the time and it's just a joke. Atleast with Flash you have just one powerful and consistent programming language that does everything, instead of some mix of messy and under-performing languages that are somehow meant to all work together and may or may not work properly/well depending on the browser.

This.

Web-design is a bad joke that self-perpetrates. If it wasn't for the idiocy that all text should be rendered - the language would be much easier to deal with.1) Ignore all whitespace outside of tags.2) Ignore all text outside of <text> or <p> tag.or 3) an Option to treat a (php) file as code, and html would get rendered when using <div>,<span>,<h#>,<p>,<text>or 4) an Option to treat "$" as a special-character that is equivalent to: <?php echo $var?>----E.g. Option 3, with a php-file

As a designer I'm more annoyed that it's only with CSS3 we FINALLY get a lot of the styling posibilities that we've needed all along, like shadows, rounded corners, gradients etc. You might not need them for many designs, but we can reduce use of images outside actual images with 90% with CSS3.

If only these things (which were just as obviously needed when CSS2 came out) had been part of the previous spec instead we might actually have them in widespread use.

To say nothing of CSS3 transformations, which will alleviate the judicous use of jQuery et al everywhere - I shouldn't need javascript for a slide animation, or smooth scroll - that's firmly on the presentation side.

It has nothing to do with HTML though. CSS3 is something I look forward to much more than HTML5 (with the exception of the <video> tag and <canvas> which are really overdue, and enable totally cool stuff).That has more to do with my perspective as a mostly-designer, though.